Search This Blog

ATI’s new 6950 design sees the implementation of narrower stram processor unit. This allows room for an increased number of SIMD engines – the 6950 has 22, while 6870 has just 14 and even 5870 had only 20. In other words, the card is more efficient and can quickly render graphics.

This architecture gives the 6950 and 6970 fewer stream processors. Whereas the Radeon 5870 boasted 1600, the 6970 offers 1536 and the 6950 has 1048.

But its worth remembering that the number of stream processors isn’t crucial- the high-calibre nVidia Geforce GTX 580 has just 512.Ample compensation comes with the significantly larger number of texture units. The 6950 has 88 of these- eight more than 5870 and 24 over the GTX 580.

The 6950 may be cheaper than its 6970 brother, but it include 2GB of GDDR5 RAM – nVidia’s 580 comes with a ‘mere’ 1536 MB-and an 800MHz core clock.

The memory clock is 1,250 MHz and the 160GBps memory bandwidth is superior to the GTX580’s 152GBps – not to mention the 6870’s 134.4GBps.

The HIS requires two six-pin power connectors. But it isn’t light on consumption. While it isn’t incredibly noisy, its 255W thermal design power is high- 6W more than the GTX570, if short of the 250W of hungry GTX 480.

Given the wide memory bandwidth and impressive specs, we would expect the 6950 to offer something special in games performance. In truth, it doesn’t. its several frames ahead of GTX 470 but costs somewhat $48 more.

In Hawx, it achieved 164 and 128fps (at 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 respectively) placing it 16 and 8fps ahead of the GTX 470 and 9 and 7fps ahead of the 5870.

In BattleForge, lower scores saw the gap close to 7.5fps and 9.1fps over the GTX 470 and 4 and 5fps over 5870

Perhaps the more interesting is battle is against 6870. The 6950 is faster in every test – but fast enough to justify a £60 difference?

In BattleForge, its 13 to 15fps faster than 6870. In Hawx, the lead is more impressive 18 to 17fps

Specifications of HIS ATI Radeon 6950:-

2GB DDR5 RAM

800MHz core clock

1250MHz memory clock

400MHz Ramdac

256bit memory interface

1408 stream preocessors

88 texture units

32 ROP units

PCI Express 2 x 6-pin power connectors

DirectX 11.0

2 x DVI

HDMI

2 x DP

2 year warranty

Cost

The cost of this gadget is priced betwwen 264$-300$ !!!........................oooooooh thats costly!